Gerald Warner is an author, broadcaster, columnist and polemical commentator who writes about politics, religion, history, culture and society in general.

BBC's paleo-news site finally runs a real scoop story on Climategate's Michael Mann

No apologies for revisiting Climategate, for this is the exposé of the can of worms that is the AGW mindset that just keeps giving. Now, what would you say if I were to tell you that the BBC News website is running a story on Professor Michael Mann, of Pennsylvania State University, one of the boys in Phil Jones’s gang hut at CRU East Anglia? “B****r me!” you would probably respond. “Don’t tell me the BBC has finally caught up with Climategate.”

Relax. I’m not telling you that; and it hasn’t. Instead, the BBC “News” site is running a story based on an article in Science magazine. Under the headline “Past climate anomalies explained,” it begins: “Unusually warm and cold periods in Earth’s pre-industrial climate history are linked to how the oceans responded to temperature changes, say scientists.” In this instance, “scientists” turns out to mean primarily Michael Mann, who is generously quoted.

“We reconstructed patterns of [the Earth’s] surface temperatures during those two intervals,” he explains, the two intervals being the “little ice age” and “medieval warm period”. There is much chatter about ice cores, tree rings and coral. There is no reference to the fact that this man is involved, very prominently, in the controversy surrounding the CRU at East Anglia, or to his interesting semantic convolutions in redefining the word “trick”.

Still less is there any acknowledgement that, at the moment, commentators in the United States, in online video reports, are reading increasing chunks of the CRU computer code and bursting into laughter at the incredible manipulations they reveal as, hour by hour, the Climategate scandal unravels. Issues relating to tree rings, not to mention Michael Mann, are central to that deconstruction of what is now being accepted, even by AGW supporters, as the junk science practised at the CRU.

Instead, the BBC – on a website devoted to “News” – thinks it more important to retail material from an article in a scientific journal, as if nothing had happened. Mann is the paleo-climate scientist who helped create the notorious “hockey stick graph” which was the first major element of the man-made global warming scam to be discredited.

Yet the paleo-news outlet that is the BBC pursues business as usual. Turmoil in Australian and New Zealand politics, with climate research in New Zealand now being similarly exposed, Congressional investigations of Climategate in the United States – all that has passed by the BBC. The big news about Michael Mann is his investigations into ocean coral. (“Apart from that, Mrs Lincoln, how did you enjoy the play?”)

Hot tip: better tune in promptly to the BBC News tonight, or you may miss the death of Queen Anne.